The XY bed of my repstrap is a decommissioned pick'n'place machine, about 220 x 180 mm travel, that I glommed off ebay. Solidly and professionally built from 6mm aluminium sheet (anodised blue, pretty!), acme 1/10" pitch leadscrews with bronze nuts, ball gibs and NEMA 23s (pretty old, but with shaft encoders) provided, cost me about USD100 landed in Australia. Considering the weight of the thing in freight, I must've bid less than USD 40 for it. No drivers for the steppers, but wired to 9-pin d-shells, with limits, and the steppers are geared down with synchro belts and pulleys. All it needed was a gantry with a z-axis and drivers for the steppers.

... some years ago i was busy developing grippers and positioning systems for pick-n-place - but more focussed on microasembling optical systems and MEMS than PCB's.

If you're interested in tools: - i developed different grippers (vacuum, tweezers and morphing structures), camera-optics with tenfold DOF than normal and micro-/nano-positioners for manual or 'teleoperated' microassembly - what's perfect suitable for PCB's too

Some of the prototypes are available - if you need something special, i can reactivate or rebuild most of them ...

But I don't know anything about Yahoo Groups... (I don't know who to send to, whether I should join the group to send, etc.)

My suggestion:

Quote
Might there be an easier way to add components (e.g. computer chips) to a circuit board? Dispense the computer chip on the circuit board. Also dispense a small magnet on the circuit board. The small magnet can be moved around by moving another magnet underneath the circuit board.

Using a video camera, an artificial-intelligence may locate the chip, and push the chip to it's correct location with the small magnet.

Once everything is in place, we can keep spraying the circuit board with glue until everything sinks in.

Note:

Maybe the small magnet should have low friction, because it presses against the circuit board and you don't want it to scratch the circuit board too much.

The dispensing mechanism does not need to be perfect... If we dispense too many unneeded components, we can move them out of the way. But what if a component becomes upside-down? The small magnet can have wedge or something to flip components. Or it can push the upside-down component out of the way and use a component that is not upside-down.

@ Andreas: I joined the group, it is public, but you will need zo have an account to see mor in that group and you just need to press the join button and fill out the captcha. Thats it. But you wouldn't find any DIY there as it seems.

@ALL: Is there actually someone building on this project? Or do i missed another place where this is going on?

Just wondering that ther ewas allready a forum for this topic. I'm very interested to get involved in this part project of reprap.

I just found some projects out there and decided to start getting the best out of what i can find.
I allready bought a vacuum compressor and a selenoid but as i will integrate it in a new CNC build I am on right now, i didn't thought much about the rest of it.